MVP - The Bare Minimum - Build Your Community

If we’re taking the soft launch approach, setting our potential customers’ expectations that what they will see on day one is not the final product, we need to decide what our bare minimum requirement is for launch.

This is what’s known as a Minimum Viable Product – just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future development.

Work out your technical requirements

For most online communities, it’s going to be something like this:

A landing page to explain what our site is for and “sell” it to the customer.
Some kind of analytics to see how many people are landing on our page, where they are coming from and what they are doing.
A way for the customer to register and pay for their access – and this payment method to be set up as a subscription if necessary.
Access control, so we can make sure those paying are the only ones who can see our premium content.
A way to contact our members to keep them posted on development.

For this site in particular, we have some differences:

We don’t need a way to take payments.
A lot of our content is blog posts (or “articles” as we’re trying to sound posh) and I really want to embed the posts and comments within the community.
We need discussion spaces in at the start as this is what we are promoting.

Plan your content delivery

As for content, we need enough to make sure the place doesn’t look empty, and a plan or schedule for upcoming content.

If you’re selling an online course, and your plan is to release (“drip”) a new lesson or section every week, you need to make sure the first one is ready. It’s a good idea to get week two lined up as well, as you’re going to be busy at the start.

Make sure you’ve got a good idea of what the lessons are going to be about, how your course is structured, because you’ll want placeholders on the site so members know that more is on the way.

But if you feel confident that you can produce week 3 after launch but before it’s needed, then that’s a great plan. Tell your members this, and encourage their feedback from the first two weeks of content.

This gets them more involved, more likely to complete the course, and makes it easier for you to make improvements as you create more lessons.

It also saves you from wasting time. You might have decided, “I really need to produce a downloadable PowerPoint deck for each lesson.” But your members might not want that.

By asking for feedback about the course materials, they may tell you that they are happy with a video and transcript. You save yourself an hour each lesson putting together a slide deck.

Or you might have recorded hours and hours of video, only for the feedback to be that it’s too quiet/loud/small/big – you’ve just saved yourself having to do it all twice.

Be brave – go public!

If you already have a platform for communicating with your potential members, perhaps you have built up a social media following, tell them what’s going on. When you are confident that you know when you are going to be ready to launch, announce it to the world!

You don’t need the full site to start registering interest, we just set up a form on our main website for people to start leaving their email addresses on. Part of our launch plan was presenting the site at a networking event, so we invited more visitors who were in our target audience.

This is a great way to motivate yourself to get things done. I’ll be using this phrase frequently as we follow the journey:

Just make it exist first. You can make it good later.